In the intro to season 6 of Novel Dialogue, Kate Marshall gets weird: “I was looking at writers who were considering themselves part of a new weird, and I wanted to ask what the old weird was, and so I started looking.”
Novel Dialogue
Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them.
A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto
“There came a point in my life … where I realized that almost every narrative, whatever it came from, that dealt with an African country was pretty much a rewriting of ‘Heart of Darkness.’”
They’re Not Metaphorical Demons: Mariana Enríquez and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
“As a horror trope, the child is always scary. It turns our notions of purity, innocence, violence, upside down.”
“The Meat and Bones of Life”: Erika T. Wurth and Leif Sorensen
“I’m not a political scientist. I didn’t major in Native American studies. I’m a doctor of metaphors.”
It’s on the Illabus: Jean-Christophe Cloutier and John Jennings
“Everything in the comic has to be thought about from front cover to end … How are you going to use all the secret resources of comics?”
Writing the Counter-Book: Joshua Cohen with Eugene Sheppard
“I was exorcising, if not the anxiety of influence, then the accusations of the anxiety of influence, and also issuing somewhat of a corrective.”
We Have This-ness Y’all! Ocean Vuong and Amy E. Elkins
“If you’re going to write in a worthwhile way about something, you have to really understand why you care.”
Reading by Translating: Ann Goldstein Talks with Saskia Ziolkowski
Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay
“A Short, Sharp Punch to the Face”: Alia Trabucco Zerán and Sophie Hughes Talk Translation
Strange Beasts of Translation: Yan Ge and Jeremy Tiang in Conversation
Light and Sound: Boubacar Boris Diop with Sarah Quesada
“I was more impressed by what I heard from my mother than by what I read in the library.”
Alejandro Zambra, Megan McDowell, and Kate Briggs on Translation
“You’re making decisions with every word, and a lot of times, those decisions are unconscious.”
Why Are You in Bed? Why Are You Drinking? Colm Tóibín and Joseph Rezek in Conversation
“The novel loves things. It loves money. It loves disappointment.”
The Romance of Recovery: Ben Bateman Talks to Shola von Reinhold
“I don't really want to write about theory, but it just keeps coming up again and again. It's inescapable.”
The Work of Inhabiting a Role: Charles Yu Speaks to Chris Fan
“I am paralyzed by the infinite degrees of freedom that you start out with, and so constraints can be freeing. To say, I can start here—I'm writing a story about time travel.”
In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans
“I'm aware, as I'm writing, that I'm changing camera angles.”
Promises Unkept: Damon Galgut and Andrew van der Vlies
“A lot of people have been pushed a little closer to the margins.”
On Being Unmoored: Chang-rae Lee Charts Fiction with Anne Anlin Cheng
“If you’re going to write in a worthwhile way about something, you have to really understand why you care.”